Through the Looking Glass

A chronicle of the absurd, in politics and life

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Useless Democrat watch:

Faced with requests from Dubya's administration which were plainly illegal, large telecom companies followed orders, letting themselves be consoled with transparently bogus legal rationales from his flunkies. Now Jay Rockefeller, Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, proposes to give them immunity because, as he says:

... private companies who received legal assurances from the highest levels of government should not be dragged through the courts for their help with national security.

Heavens! If they were, then future criminal administrations might not be able to make their own crimes legal by fiat... and what, then would be the future of the Republic?

To be fair to Rockefeller, he goes on:

The onus is on the administration, not the companies, to ensure that the request is on strong legal footing, and if it is not, it is the administration that should be held accountable.

For some reason, press reports of the statement omit the calls for immediate impeachment and prosecution which would be needed to make this even minimally credible, but I'll stop calling Rockefeller a spineless toady to Republican power just as soon as they come along...

Every Sunday this year, regular as clockwork, the Patriots have demolished another opponent, leaving fans of their hapless victims seized by a vague, nameless horror so mystical and well-nigh ineffable that they almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. One ESPN columnist has opined that in response to the trumped up "sign-stealing" scandal from earlier this year, head coach Bill Belichick is attempting to "lay waste to the NFL" (while another posits next weekend's tilt against the Colts, the other undefeated team in the league, as a battle of good vs. evil).

Well, if the idea is to show that Belichick doesn't need film from the other team's sidelines to win a game, just running up the score won't help. Perhaps, if they get past the Colts, he could just let the players on the field against some second-rate opponent play the game as they saw fit, while he himself was on the sidelines, visibly engaged in a seven-game simultaneous chess match with the rest of his coaching staff. If they won without any assistance from the coaches, electronic or otherwise, it probably still wouldn't silence the critics, but it would be interesting to watch. The chess, I mean... because the second halves of these football games have just been impossibly dull.

Someone was wearing a Jacoby Ellsbury jersey at the anti-war rally on Boston Common yesterday. I didn't know they were selling those yet.

The signs ranged from the usual ("support the troops; bring them home") to the forward-looking ("no war on Iran") to appeals from fringe candidates ("Mike Gravel will free Leonard Peltier; why won't Dennis Kucinich?" Ummm... because neither one will get elected?) to the just plain weird. There was art, some of it striking: three identical triplets dressed up as a 9/11 office worker, an American soldier, and an Iraqi civilian, with red fabric held over their hearts and cascading down, the size proportional to casualty counts written on their foreheads, twelve dead per square inch. The Americans' were ribbons --- the soldier's slightly longer than the office worker's. From the Iraqi, yards of blood-red fabric cascaded over the grass. I'm not sure where they got their estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties, (370,000), but it's below the low end of the most recent Lancet estimate, which is more than a year old now.

After the rally, there was a march. At the far end of it, at Copley Square, it ran into a different rally, coincidentally scheduled, on the Israeli/Palestinian issue. That rally got underway just as the march reached the square, right down to the minute. The folks at Copley got the marchers to join in their chants --- where they were stationed, which was (again by coincidence) the only point along the route where I saw any local media TV presence at all. And so it was, in an environment where even Jewish critics of the Israeli government are routinely slagged as anti-semites, that the reporters got shots of a march in opposition to the Iraq war chanting stridently anti-Israel slogans --- with "Christian Zionists" at an oddly placed counter-demonstration displaying questionable pro-Israel quotes from Martin Luther King on signs as a backdrop. Strange how that happens.

There were too few people. When I left Park Street station to find the rally, I couldn't see it --- it was within my line of sight, but the crowd was just too small to be visible from the edge of a park which really isn't all that big to begin with. Far, far, far too few people.

(More: Picture of the performance trio as part of this article, which also notes that the crowd was about 10,000 --- swelled by passers-by, but still too small; it ought to rate as much as a baseball game.)

(A minor digression on MLK... he probably did say something along the lines of what was on the placards, but it's being taken way out of context. King can't have expressed much of an opinion on the Israeli government policies toward an occupation that was barely underway at the time he was killed --- but anyone who thinks he would unreservedly support the current Israeli government's wall-building and travel restrictions on the West Bank has a far different view of the man and his career than I do...)

Someone was wearing a Jacoby Ellsbury jersey at the anti-war rally on Boston Common yesterday. I didn't know they were selling those yet.

The signs ranged from the usual ("support the troops; bring them home") to the forward-looking ("no war on Iran") to appeals from fringe candidates ("Mike Gravel will free Leonard Peltier; why won't Dennis Kucinich?" Ummm... because neither one will get elected?) to the just plain weird. There was art, some of it striking: three identical triplets dressed up as a 9/11 office worker, an American soldier, and an Iraqi civilian, with red fabric held over their hearts and cascading down, the size proportional to casualty counts written on their foreheads. The Americans' were ribbons --- the soldier's slightly longer than the office worker's. From the Iraqi, yards of blood-red fabric cascaded over the grass. I'm not sure where they got their estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties, (370,000), but it's below the low end of the most recent Lancet estimate, which is more than a year old now.

After the rally, there was a march. At the far end of it, at Copley Square, it ran into a different rally, coincidentally scheduled, on the Israeli/Palestinian issue. That rally got underway just as the march reached the square, right down to the minute. The folks at Copley got the marchers to join in their chants --- where they were stationed, which was (again by coincidence) the only point along the route where I saw any local media presence at all. And so it was, in an environment where even Jewish critics of the Israeli government are routinely slagged as anti-semites, that the reporters got shots of a march in opposition to the Iraq war chanting stridently anti-Israel slogans --- with "Christian Zionists" displaying questionable pro-Israel quotes from Martin Luther King on signs as a backdrop. Strange how that happens.

There were too few people. When I left Park Street station to find the rally, I couldn't see it --- it was within my line of sight, but the crowd was just too small to be visible from the edge of a park which really isn't all that big to begin with. Far, far, far too few people.

(A minor digression on MLK... he probably did say something along the lines of what was on the placards, but it's being taken way out of context. King can't have expressed much of an opinion on the Israeli government policies toward an occupation that was barely underway at the time he was killed --- but anyone who thinks he would unreservedly support the current Israeli government's wall-building and travel restrictions on the West Bank has a far different view of the man and his career than I do...)